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Wish fulfillment?

Ambrose Evans Pritchard, the business columnist of the Daily Telegraph has an agenda: he does not support the Euro.

Fair enough.

He writes a lot about the problems he sees with the currency

Also, fair enough.

His latest story on the subject is that Germans are now no longer accepting Euro notes with serial numbers that show that they are printed in Latin countries like Spain (prefix letter V) or Italy (prefix letter S), and are swapping these for notes with the German prefix X.

If true, then this is extremely serious, since it implies that German consumers might refuse to accept non-German notes and that would effectively end the currency union.

The trouble is, I can find no other reference to this behaviour anywhere. Wherever I have looked, the single reference for the story is the story itself and nothing else.

Has Evans Pritchard just printed a story that he would like to be true? If so he has committed the cardinal crime of any journalist.

He must give a source for this story, because the consequences are critical and I am not sure I believe him.

Evans Pritchard's credibility is on the line.

UPDATE: I have continued to look, and the only evidence has been anecdotal and can find no corroberation beyond what has been posted below for Ambrose Evans Pritchard's story.

If not total fiction, to print the story as Pritchard has done is highly misleading. It may be actionable under the false rumours section of the FSA.

I can remember when the Euro was launched there was a story going round about a German city that had given it up and had gone back to using the Mark, but no one could ever say which actual city it was. This story seems to have been cut from the same cloth.

Further to Ian_qt and Thon Brocket, the Handelsblatt article says in the first line: "Es geht um eine kleine Minderheit. Man muss sie Exoten nennen." ie "This is about a small minority. They are best called exotic.". So, not sure this is a good basis on which to write a long article in the Evening Standard on how terrible things are with the Euro. Why are people picking on Spain, anyway? Spanish banks suffered the least in the crunch...

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